How Afghanistan Became a War for NATO

The official line of the International Security Assistance
Force (ISAF), the NATO command in Afghanistan, is that the war
against Afghan insurgents is vital to the security of all the
countries providing troops there.

In fact, however, NATO was given a central role in
Afghanistan because of the influence of U.S. officials
concerned with the alliance, according to a U.S. military
officer who was in a position to observe the decision-making
process.

“NATO’s role in Afghanistan is more about NATO than it is
about Afghanistan,” the officer, who insisted on anonymity
because of the political sensitivity of the subject, told
IPS in an interview.

The alliance would never have been given such a prominent
role in Afghanistan but for the fact that the George W. Bush
administration wanted no significant U.S. military role
there that could interfere with their plans to take control
of Iraq.

That reality gave U.S. officials working on NATO an opening.

Gen. James Jones, the Supreme Allied Commander Europe
(SACEUR) from 2003 to 2005, pushed aggressively for giving
NATO the primary security role in Afghanistan, according to
the officer.

“Jones sold [Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld on turning
Afghanistan over to NATO,” said the officer, adding that he
did so with the full support of Pentagon officials with
responsibilities for NATO. “You have to understand that the
NATO lobbyists are very prominent in the Pentagon – both in
the Office of the Secretary of Defense and on the Joint
Staff,” said the officer.

Jones admitted in an October 2005 interview with American
Forces Press Service that NATO had struggled to avoid
becoming irrelevant after the collapse of the Soviet Union
and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact. “NATO was in limbo
for a bit,” he said.

But the 9/11 attacks had offered a new opportunity for NATO
to demonstrate its relevance.

The NATO allies were opposed to the U.S. war in Iraq, but
they wanted to demonstrate their support for stabilizing and
reconstructing Afghanistan. Jones prodded NATO member
countries to provide troops for Afghanistan and to extend
NATO operations from the north into the west and eventually
to the east and south, where U.S. troops were concentrated.

That position coincided with the interests of NATO’s
military and civilian bureaucrats and those of the military
establishments in the member countries.

But there was one major problem: public opinion in NATO
member countries was running heavily against military
involvement in Afghanistan.

To get NATO allies to increase their troop presence in
Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005, Jones assured member states
that they would only be mopping up after the U.S. military
had defeated the Taliban. On a visit to Afghanistan in
August 2004, Jones said, “[W]e should not ever even think
that there is going to be an insurrection of the type that
we see in Iraq here. It’s just not going to happen.”

Reassured by Washington and by Jones, in September 2005,
NATO defense ministers agreed formally that NATO would
assume command of southern Afghanistan in 2006.

But conflicts immediately arose between the U.S. and NATO
member countries over the NATO mission in Afghanistan.
Britain, Germany, Canada, and the Netherlands had all sold
the NATO mission to their publics as “peacekeeping” or
“reconstruction” as distinct from counterinsurgency war.

When the Bush administration sought to merge the U.S. and
NATO commands in Afghanistan, key allies pushed back,
arguing the two commands had different missions. The French,
meanwhile, were convinced the Bush administration was using
NATO troops to fill the gap left by shifting U.S. troops
from Afghanistan to Iraq – a war they strongly opposed.

The result was that one NATO member state after another
adopted “caveats” that ruled out or severely limited their
troops from actually carrying out combat in Afghanistan.

Even as the Bush administration was assuring its NATO allies
that they would not have to face a major Taliban uprising,
U.S. intelligence was reporting that the insurgency was
growing and would intensify in spring 2006.

Gen. Karl Eikenberry, who had just arrived as commander of
all U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2005, and newly appointed
U.S. Ambassador Ronald E. Neumann were warning Washington
that the well-publicized domestic debates in NATO member
states over troop commitments were “generating a perception
of NATO political weakness,” as Neumann recalls in his
memoirs on Afghanistan published in 2009.

Neumann wrote that both he and Eikenberry believed “the
insurgents would see ISAF’s expansion and the U.S.
contraction as the moment to rekindle the war.”

But Eikenberry assured the news media that the insurgency
was under control. In a Dec. 8, 2005, press briefing at the
Pentagon, Eikenberry asserted that the more aggressive
Taliban tactics were “very much a sign of weakness.”

Asked if he wasn’t concerned that the situation in
Afghanistan was “sliding towards an Iraqi scenario,”
Eikenberry replied, “[W]e see no indications that such is
the case….”

A few weeks later the Taliban launched the biggest offensive
since its regime was ousted in 2001, seizing control of much
of Helmand, Kandahar and several other southern provinces.

Eikenberry, clearly under orders from Rumsfeld, continued to
carry out the policy of turning the south over to NATO in
mid-2006. He was rewarded in early 2007 by being sent to
Brussels as deputy chairman of NATO’s Military Committee.

Eikenberry acknowledged in testimony before Congress in
February 2007 that the policy of turning Afghanistan over to
NATO was really about the future of NATO rather than about
Afghanistan. He noted the argument that failure in
Afghanistan could “break” NATO, while hailing the new NATO
role in Afghanistan as one that could “make” the alliance.

“The long view of the Afghanistan campaign,” said
Eikenberry, “is that it is a means to continue the
transformation of the alliance.”

The Afghanistan mission, Eikenberry said, “could mark the
beginning of sustained NATO efforts to overhaul alliance
operational practices in every domain.” Specifically, he
suggested that NATO could use Afghan deployments to press
some member nations to carry out “military modernization.”

But Canadian Gen. Rick Hillier, who commanded NATO forces
in Afghanistan from February to August 2004 and was later
chief of staff of Canadian armed forces from 2005 to 2008,
wrote in his memoir A Soldier First, published in 2009,
that NATO was an unmitigated disaster in Afghanistan.

He recalled that when it formally accepted responsibility
for Afghanistan in 2003, NATO had “no strategy, no clear
articulation of what it wanted to achieve” and that its
performance was “abysmal.”

Hillier said the situation “remains unchanged” after several
years of NATO responsibility for Afghanistan. NATO had
“started down a road that destroyed much of its credibility
and in the end eroded support for the mission in every
nation in the alliance,” Hillier wrote.

“Afghanistan has revealed,” wrote Hiller, “that NATO has
reached the stage where it is a corpse decomposing….”